The decline of the West, Volume 1 : $b Form and actualitySpengler, Oswald
Philosophy
The decline of the West, Volume 1 : $b Form and actuality
Spengler, Oswald
Civilization -- History
Every higher language possesses a number of words such as luck, doom,
conjuncture, vocation, about which there is, as it were, a veil. No
hypothesis, no science, can ever get into touch with that which we feel
when we let ourselves sink into the meaning and sound of these words.
They are symbols, not notions. In them is the centre of gravity of that
world-picture that I have called the World-as-history as opposed to the
World-as-nature. The Destiny-idea demands life-experience and not
scientific experience, the power of seeing and not that of calculating,
depth and not intellect. There is an _organic logic_, an instinctive,
dream-sure logic of all existence as opposed to the _logic of the
inorganic_, the logic of understanding and of things understood—a logic
of direction as against a logic of extension—and no systematist, no
Aristotle or Kant, has known how to deal with it. They are on their own
ground when they tell us about “judgment,” “perception,” “awareness,”
and “recollection,” but as to what is in the words “hope,” “happiness,”
“despair,” “repentance,” “devotion,” and “consolation” they are silent.
He who expects here, in the domain of the living, to find reasons and
consequences, or imagines that an inward certainty as to the meaning of
life is the same thing as “Fatalism” or “Predestination,” simply knows
nothing of the matters in question, confusing experience lived with
experience acquired or acquirable. Causality is the reasonable, the law-
bound, the describable, the badge of our whole waking and reasoning
existence. But destiny is the word for an inner certainty that is _not_
describable. We bring out that which is in the causal by means of a
physical or an epistemological system, through numbers, by reasoned
classification; but the idea of destiny can be imparted only by the
artist working through media like portraiture, tragedy and music. The
one requires us to _distinguish_ and in distinguishing to dissect and
destroy, whereas the other is _creative_ through and through, and thus
destiny is related to life and causality to death.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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